Underground
by Summoner Luna
Summary: It's only forever. Not long at all. -Seifer, the Sorceress, and paths that aren't.- [You have no power over me]
1. Chapter 1

_When the world is at its end, he will stand on broken earth and she will be there before him. _

_"This can be yours," she'll say. "It's not too late." _

_He will look around, and will wonder why she offers him ruins. She will be too weak to stand, and he will know this is the moment of her death. Unless he steps forward to stop it. _

_"Why?" is all he will say._

_She will cough. He will watch the blood spatter onto the rocks, and wonder at how he ever came to view her as powerful. _

_"Why?" he will repeat, "Would I ever want anything you could ever offer?" _

_He'll spit at the ground in front of her. And she will let out a cry that rips a hole in the fabric of time itself, and through it, he will fall._

_He will return a hero. And she?_

… … …

_. _

She appears to him in a disguise, at first, and he falls for it.

Seifer has seen this movie before. He's worn the thin band of tape down until the sound is distorted and the screen is a series of stripes and streaks. He's paid to have it loaded to his desktop and has spent nights he should have been studying glued to the screen, watching, hoping, dreaming; sleeping-walking through classes the next day and frustrating everyone around him as he passes his tests even though he's obviously too distracted to pay attention in class.

He's watched this scene.

A Knighting?

He is not there yet. But when she shows herself he is not fooled by the layers of purple and the clockwork on her back. She is familiar, but she is _more._

_Come with me to a place of no return. Bid farewell to your childhood._

_(he is seated on the rug in a room he can only just remember._

_"seifer, time for bed," a voice says. _

_"but it's not over yet," he pleads. "can't I please watch until the end?")_

He does not waste time looking at the faces he is leaving behind.

The haze closes around him and when it fades he is in the same room he left behind, and he is alone. Seifer walks to the spot where Squall stood, moments before, and stares at the empty space.

"Just watch," he says. "And you'll see."

He pulls Hyperion out of its sheath and rests it on his shoulder, and marches towards the door.

He doesn't know what he expects to see, but it is not the wide expanse of everything he has ever known, twisted over itself before him, and he pauses, and wonders if he is not making a mistake.

_("it's only us," the woman on the screen says. she is beautiful, and young as he is, seifer knows he wants to keep her safe. _

_"but we'll survive," the man says. _

_**"we'll survive," **__young seifer tells the screen.) _

"We'll survive."

Seifer steps through the door and hears it close, unbidden, behind him. The path that stretched through his past and into something dark and unknown settles in front of him, and when he takes his first step it is strong and certain.

She's here, somewhere. And Seifer intends to find her.

* * *

_Oops. My hand slipped. This *might* be inspired by Labyrinth. Might be. So, uh, wish me luck!_


	2. Chapter 2

The Labyrinth looks like Deling, but Deling behind a pane of glass. Seifer knows there is nothing here he can reach out and touch that would feel the way it should, and in front of everything is the faint reflection of the world on his side of the window.

"You made a good choice."

He is standing at a crosswalk, and the voice belongs to a man in a police uniform.

"What?" is all he can say. He doesn't know if he even had a choice to make.

"I'll take you there," the officer says. "She told us to expect you."

He ignores the look in the officer's eyes, and the feeling that this is easier than it is supposed to be, and follows the man through an upper class neighborhood in the direction he knows the Presidential Palace should be.

He knows Deling well, after all, and he knows this street better than most.

Seifer turns his head to the side when they walk past the towering white manor, and grows irritated when the officer pauses.

"What's the problem?" he snarls, and the officer does not look frightened or defensive or anything other than vaguely confused.

"N-nothing, sir…sir- I'm sorry sir, I didn't catch your name."

"And you won't," he says. "Can we keep moving?"

There are shadows behind the hedges that line the sidewalk; shadows that look like himself, a year ago, skulking in the darkness to the corner window on the second story.

"Apologies, sir."

Seifer sees his reflection in every step he takes, and the man that leads him blurs in and out of focus as they pass under every streetlight.

_Wrong way,_ some part of him says, when they turn from the street the Caraway mansion is on. _You've passed it._

He does not look over his shoulder.

The officer leaves him on the palace steps and Seifer stares up, and wonders if he has not come to this point too soon. The ribbon of time that stretched out from the TV studio flickers past the steps of the palace. Turrets grow and there is the distant ringing of a giant clock, and Seifer hears the screams of monsters he has yet to face anywhere in this world.

But then he sees _her_, draped in the clothes and skin of someone he knew in another life, and knows the steps in front of him are yet another disguise. _This_ place is not his, and neither is it hers. Your Sorceress is in another Castle.

But it is theirs for the moment. It is a pause in a journey that Seifer has been ready to take for as long as he can remember, and he swallows the feeling that there is something about it that is off, and he walks up the stairs.

The large doors open before him, and she waits for him in the entrance.

_("come in," she says.)_

"Come in," she says. "I've been waiting for you."

_("i didn't know if you would find me.")_

He bows. His blade is heavy on his hip and the room is hot.

He wishes she would lose the disguise.

"We'll be making our appearance, soon." Her face is hidden and he is grateful, and she stretches her long fingers towards him and brushes them across his face. Seifer turns, and lets them trail down his neck towards his throat, and she lets her hand rest against his shoulder and guides him down the hall, into some back room. He can hear noises from the other side of the wall, and the door she exits into closes hard behind him.

He waits. Minutes, if not days.

"You're to ride with her," someone says beside him, and he starts at the interruption of solitude. The speaker is in costume, and runs towards the door when Seifer turns to look.

_Ride?_

Somewhere in the palace _(the castle)_ he hears a familiar cry that is silenced before it even begins, and he grips the hilt of Hyperion and closes his eyes and tries and tries and tries to place the voice, and fails.

"Let's go."

Her voice reaches him before she does, and she does not stop when she sweeps past him, and Seifer follows. She leaves grey smoke in her wake and he walks through the trail, and when he climbs the steps to stand beside her throne she looks at him and meets his eye and he sees himself reflected.

She is there, he knows. Underneath the familiar face. She is there and all he has to do is keep going and he will find her.

The cry he heard before rings out again. The terror in it reaches into all of his dark and hidden places, and the face that leans back into the throne watches him through the dim firelight of the torches that surround them, and she smirks.

He shakes his head to clear the distant screaming, and the gates open to the beating of drums, and Seifer steps forward and stands tall, and pulls his weapon out where all below can see, and draws his face into the look of man who is proud to stand where he has been granted privilege.

_("of course i found you. i could find you anywhere.")_

The people on the street look up at them and their eyes gleam with either fear or reverence, and Seifer does not look back.

He sees the image he saw before, of the castle against the palace, and now he does not feel afraid. The heat from the crowds below them rise up and he absorbs it all, and knows she feels his resolution grow-

_I will not fail you._

-And when the gates close around them, he already knows who he is about to face.

The cries from before come back to him in a rush of memory, and Seifer turns on the shape that climbs up to face him and snarls, and doesn't know if it is the past or the future that he is more interested in protecting, and thinks, for a moment, that it might be both.

_("which way?" he asks, and they stand at the edge of the tower where she has been imprisoned. _

_"we mustn't rush," she says, and child-seifer speaks her next words with her. "one road leads us back to home. but the other…"_

_"what?"_

_"it leads to a death beyond death." _

_"how…how will we know which way to go?")_

"I can fight, as long as I'm with you!"

Seifer looks up, and _she_ is there, and she is not watching him but the witch behind him, and he allows himself a minute to try and gain composure. Spells fly above his head, and he looks to the side, to the place where he could run, now; could flee.

_The other way leads to a death beyond death._

He's heard this riddle before, but he cannot remember the answer.

"I said I would stay," he hisses, and balls his hands into fists against the slick floor of the parade float.

Blue light flashes bright above him.

Squall falls.

And Seifer stands.

_("we don't. but we'll figure it out.")_

The riddle, he remembers, is a lie. Both paths can lead to either place, and it is up to him to figure out where he wants to go.


	3. Chapter 3

Inside the prison, the reflection-effect is gone. He is here, in all of its dark and grungy reality. The hem of his coat is beginning to fray, and there is something black, blacker than dirt and filth from the street, something that pooled at his feet when he stood and watched them carry Squall's body away.

He is here, and the tunnels between the prison cells are dim and grey.

_All of it is dark, _he thinks, and it echoes.

_("it's all so…dark."_

_on the screen the sorceress leads her knight through a hallway, or a cave.)_

He find the cell he is looking for and watches for a moment through the window, and is disgusted that his great adversary is someone so slight, so pathetic. _I've fought him before, and won,_ he thinks, and before he can catch himself the cell dissolves into a float on the streets of Deling City, and Seifer sees himself, kneeling and broken.

In his memory she did not look at him, did not even notice him. She sent ice and fire flying above his head as though he were nothing more than a prop on the float itself, and he would have avoided her gaze regardless out of shame. In this vision, she turns to him, watches him gasping, and reminds him: _"And you've fought him before, and lost."_

It won't happen again.

There is immeasurable satisfaction in hearing Squall's screams bounce around the walls of the prison, and Seifer throws an extra charge, _because, _he thinks, _why the hell not? _and spits on his boots after Squall falls unconscious. He did not expect to break him, not this easily at least, but he finds no remorse in causing as much pain as possible.

"Flowers," he scoffs-and the dank air is full of them, and there is deep, feminine laughter in the room around him.

_"You want flowers?" _

_(in the central square the people have grown flowers in her honor, in her absence-)_

"Leave him." She is beside him, and Seifer looks at the body hanging on the wall, and has never known a hatred so deep. He would kill him now, if she hadn't willed him not to, and she knows this. "Leave him," she says again, and he obeys.

"This way, sir."

One of the prison guards greets him outside the interrogation room, and he is familiar, and Seifer places him as the officer that led him through the streets of Deling. He wants to ask but knows better, and follows him up staircase after staircase _-winding, with wooden railings and stone monsters in the shape of something out of nightmares-, _and into an unmarked SUV, and Seifer watches the road shift from desert sand, to stone walkway, to desperate barren earth, and is not surprised when he finally opens the door so many miles away, and she is still standing before him.

"Perhaps," she says, "You won't manage to fail at this."

She gestures to a door and he sees it as heavy and ornate, and when he swings it open it leads down a path, and to a screen.

"Right here, sir." The guard (the guide?) points at a panel of buttons, so out of place among the wood and vines of the path she has set him on, and he gives the red one in the center a gentle tap-

-the illusion fades, and Seifer is watching missiles fire from a room behind a glass wall.

"What-?"

She is behind him, and slides long fingers across his shoulder and up over his hair, and Seifer shivers at her touch.

_(the first of the bombs go off, and he watches her, his queen, and she stands, fearless against them. "we will survive this." it is a promise. _

_child-Seifer moves closer to the edge of his chair.)_

"They will not survive this."

On the screen he follows the trajectory of the missiles. He has never set foot in Trabia Garden, and now, he knows, he never will.

"You know what's next," she says, and she is gone.

Seifer turns to the guide, now wearing the uniform of the Galbadian Army, and he gives a thin-lipped smile.

"You have something else to see," the guide says. Seifer nods, afraid he will be sick if he tries to speak, and now when he rides along the desert road he avoids looking out the window.

_"You're not afraid, are you?" _

She shows him, not the Castle, but the War: SeeDs lined up against her, against them. Shining on their uniforms is the golden seal of Trabia, and they vanish, one by one, until the field of the enemies is clear.

_"Like he said," _she tells him. _"You made a good choice." _

He almost believes her.

"Well," says the guide, pulling him out of the battlefield and into the deep forest outside of G-Garden, and brings the car to a sudden stop. Seifer looks past the mottled shadows covering the forest floor, where two familiar faces are fiercely outnumbered by a group of fighters he knows at a glance are from Garden. "Your orders, sir."

"…Let me out."

The car vanishes, and Seifer steps forward. The sounds of the fight fade as the students start to notice him, until the only noise in the heavy silence of the wood are his footsteps, slow and even over the blanket of dead leaves. He doesn't stop walking until he has reached their center, and he is surrounded by them. The swollen, bloody faces of his friends look up at him, and he nods.

His work is quick.

"Seifer-" Fujin's voice comes out as a whisper, and it does not become her.

"We told them we're-" Raijin interrupts himself with a wet cough, and Seifer looks between them and they are silenced by his glance. Raijin coughs again, and spits blood onto the ground, and Seifer reaches forward and the three of them watch the green haze move from his hand into his friend's chest.

_Are we still friends? _

"Friends," Fujin says blankly.

"Friends."

_-In the stone castle in the future, Seifer has no friends-_

_("you should play with your friends." matron kneels beside him and reaches for the remote, and child-seifer grabs it from her and cries out in protest. _

_on the screen, a man makes a speech to room full of allies before marching into battle, and they cheer. they will follow him, even to their deaths.)_

"Come with me."

They stand.

The path to the castle, Seifer decides, is wide enough for three.


End file.
